Borders and intimate state encounters

This chapter details how re-bordering has occurred in the UK through welfare regulations that emerge in the home space. The chapter is underpinned by elaborating on ‘bordering’ as a theoretical perspective, and how the borders of Europe have become deterritorialised. The chapter reveals how inclusion operates through exclusion, as those who formally gain legal residency are called upon to consistently perform deservingness and gratitude through long-standing, individualised and fragile caring relationships with frontline actors. The chapter details the costs and injuries of these practices and how they contain both the promise of safety and also the fear of losing children to state care. These encounters demonstrate how care shifts the ‘location’ of the state and creates different forms of belonging.

Interlude | Losing Sophia and Angela

I meet Sophia walking down the street with Armando, who is now 13 months old. She is pushing a buggy which is also laden with shopping bags hanging over the handle bars. The buggy looks old and one of the wheels isn’t working properly. It seems to be taking all of her energy to push it through the residential backstreets. She tells me to come with her because she has moved to a different house. I offer to push the buggy but after I try and am completely unable to steer it along the pavement, I take the shopping bags and walk along beside her. She tells me she has been refused child benefit for the second time in London. She has indefinite leave to remain and has a national insurance number but she has been refused and she doesn’t know why. We arrive at the house and it seems very different from the other houses I have previously visited. It is not a small Victorian terrace but a bungalow. When we enter it has many different rooms with locks on the doors, separated by small dark corridors. There is a large kitchen and living room that are almost entirely empty and bare apart from three couches which look as though they have been made for an office waiting room. They have grey plastic cushions and wooden frames. There are large glass doors that open out to a large grassy back garden. There are two men at the bottom of the garden looking into cages full of dogs. Sophia tells me that this is the landlord who is breeding dogs. Armando has fallen asleep so Sophia takes me to her room and places Armando in a drawer on the floor that she is using for a cot. We return to the kitchen where she begins to unpack the shopping she has just bought and begins to make chips out of a large bag of potatoes....

Home truths: fieldwork, writing and anthropology’s ‘home encounter’

This chapter presents the methodology of the research including theoretical discussions of ‘anthropological truth’, the researchers’ shifting situated positions throughout the fieldwork and the writing process. This chapter draws on Munn’s conception of the social actor as a mobile spatial field. The home emerged as the most salient site of interaction through this methodology. This has two implications. First, it provides a different entry point to social worlds (resonating with feminist analytics) rather than choosing a space and exploring the social actors that create it. Second, this approach revealed the home as the site where ‘culture’ was located and contested. This opens the home space to studies on diversity and conviviality. It also demonstrates the different terms that encounters in the home took on through the social roles of host and hosting, the materiality of the space, and gendered dynamics.

Interlude | Clara’s Belgian torte

I first saw Clara in a large framed picture in the front room of the house where Maria stayed. It was a wedding picture. Clara was dressed in an elaborate white dress and next to her stood Sergui in his suit, waistcoat and baby-pink tie. Clara had her hands on her hips and head slightly tilted. Sergui stood beside and slightly behind her, looking straight at the camera. I learnt later that she was 15 in this photograph and Sergui was 17 years old. Their fathers were brothers, making them first cousins or ...

Intimate bureaucracy and home encounters

This chapter looks specifically at ‘home encounters’ and how they became the dominant mode of interaction with the state for mothers identified as Romanian Roma. Encounters between subjects and objects of state care have been explored through many different literatures including social work, geography, anthropology of the state, social policy and urban studies. In particular the emotional framing of encounters has been most recently explored through two sets of literature that have developed separately, namely the anthropology of the state (Reeves 2014) and social policy (Crawford and Flint 2015; Lawson and Elwood 2014; Stenson 2013). Making links between these bodies of literature allows us to think beyond strict dichotomies of the ‘state’ and ‘community’ to how boundaries emerge and are made significant. It also allows us to ask questions around the costs and injuries of these new forms of governance. This chapter shows not only that processes such as bordering and gatekeeping services take place within the home, but that the nature of these processes – and therefore the reproduction of the state – take on different forms and complexities because they take place within the home, informing who is deemed morally legitimate to receive care.

Interlude | Disappearing Dinni

It is a Friday morning in May 2013 and Dan has risen very early. I hear the front door slam at around 5:30. I gradually fall asleep, trying to ignore the rats running through the walls and in the bathroom next door. I know that Dan is on his way to London to pick up someone from Victoria coach station in London because, about two weeks ago, I went with Cristina to Western Union to transfer money to an address in Moldavia. She told me it was to pay the coach fare for a lady to come to the house. When I asked exactly who, she replied a lady who was Dan’s sister but only ‘half-half’ (pash pash). At around 11 o’clock Dan returns accompanied by Dinni, a small lady who looks as though she could be around 50. Her face is tanned and rough as though she had been working outdoors for a long time and she is wearing a headscarf. She looks visibly tired and after being hugged by Cristina with “Peace, my sister” (...

Interlude | Facebook with Cristina

It is 28 June 2013 and I’m sitting on the bed in my small room in Cristina’s house. There is a chest of drawers in the room that Cristina found in the street, which she cleaned and squeezed into the room next to the bed. Cristina comes in and stands on the small part of the floor between the bed and the wall. She has received a letter from the telephone company and she wants to know whether this means she can use the internet. She wants to use Facebook to try to find her sister. Dan, her husband, had mentioned to me before that Cristina’s sister moved to Italy when she was 15 (Cristina was 6 years old at the time) with an Italian man. Cristina thought that she would be able to find her sister through Facebook and often asked to use my phone, which could access the internet, to search for her sister’s name....

Conclusion

This book has explored what is at stake when negotiations of political belonging occur directly through everyday practices of belonging in homes. It is based on a relational understanding of the state where the state emerges through the contestation and struggle of differentially positioned and socially situated actors. It has linked state reproduction (processes of political belonging) with social reproduction (the discursive ideology and practices of care necessary to maintain and reproduce human life), paying particular attention to the role of space....

Interlude | Remembering Brussels with Georgeta

Georgeta and I are sitting in the living room of the small semi-detached house where Georgeta and her family have been staying for the last two months. There is a kitchen and living room downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs with a small bathroom. At this time there are five adults and three children living in the house: Georgeta and her husband, Rosvan, their eldest son, Emil, his wife, Denisa and their new baby, Sarah, their younger son, Vali, and me. She is worried because she doesn’t have the money to pay the rent this month. She says this quietly while looking into her empty coffee cup, “I don’t want these problems in my life, I want peace,” (...

Romanian Roma mothers: labelling and negotiating stigma

This chapter examines the position of new migrant families to the UK and how they come to be perceived as Romanian Roma; the generative and coproduced nature of labelling; the symbolic violence that is accomplished through this label; and how it comes to hold currency in the UK state apparatus. The first section of the chapter focuses on how the label developed. The second section charts how being categorised in this way led to home encounters through the particular lens on child safeguarding. The third section of this chapter considers how mothers’ understanding of their position and room for manoeuvre were shaped by their backgrounds such as illiteracy and previous experience of state violence. The chapter examines how encounters came to contribute to the mutual constitution of respective identities and how these shaped understandings of, and fears and desires for, the state.